"from developer Trion Worlds, is quickly approaching its March 1 release date, and with the game now in open beta, things are starting to look better than ever for the gorgeous massively multiplayer online role-playing game. If you still aren't familiar with RIFT, check out the preview we did last month where we took a look at the first 20 levels of gameplay. This time around, we got to sit down with RIFT producer Adam Gershowitz as he showed us various aspects of end game raiding.

End game raiding in RIFT comes in both 10 and 20-man flavors, both offering different things. Ten-man exterior raiding can be described as "on-demand Rifting," where a group gathers supplies to form a Raid Rift Lure out in the open world. The way it works is both public and personal. A group opens the Rift tear, and fights the subsequent stages, sub-bosses, and bosses with their group.

What's really interesting about the open world mechanic, however, is that other people can join your raid to help you fight off the baddies. The more people who are helping, the harder the encounter becomes. The way the developers have combated griefing and ninjalooting is that only the people in the group that opened the Rift will receive proper loot, whereas the helpers will just receive some tokens and cash. It’s a refreshingly original concept that lends itself to a lot of cooperative play, as well as a fun end game experience. The more supplies your guild can gather, the more Rift raids you can open, and there's no limit on the amount of times you can open them, just on how many supplies you can farm.VIDEO: RIFT: Planes of Telara Video -- PVP Game Modes Revealed We also saw an interior 20-man raid called Greenscale's Blight (GB). What was particularly cool about this raid was that, even though it took place inside, it was still a dynamic instance. There was a giant maze in the center of a large room, and it changed dramatically as we moved through the raid instance and encountered different bosses. As it stands right now, it's undetermined how the maze will change every single time you enter it, but it's an interesting addition to the game. It allows for a variety of experiences when you don't need a super large space to have a unique raid. Also, these raids work more traditionally and will be on a lockout timer.There are five different types of Rift raids that will be available at launch, and then a number of unlockable instanced raids will be released post-launch. The unlockable raids unlock through world events, where the entire server enters a multiday event that, when completed, will open the raid to everyone.

Finally, the raids are not progression based, meaning you don't have to do the 10-man exterior Rift raids in order to try out the 20-man ones. Both raids offer interesting new takes on end game progression, and look fun.